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This blog aims at identifying the latest news on four specific themes regarding urbanisation in China: the institutional foundations and policies for urbanisation, the territorial expansion of Chinese cities, the infrastructures and services for sustainable urbanisation, the building of urban communities. It will also provide information on ongoing research within the FP7 Project UrbaChina – Sustainable urbanisation in China: Historical and comparative perspectives, Mega-trends towards 2050.

Chinese social policy in a time of transition

Besharov, Douglas and Baehler, Karen, eds. (2013). Chinese social policy in a time of transition. Oxford University Press. 368 p. ISBN 978-0-19-999031-3

The story of China’s spectacular economic growth is well known. Less well known is the country’s equally dramatic, though not always equally successful, social policy transition. Between the mid- 1990s and mid-2000s—-the focal period for this book—-China’s central government went a long way toward consolidating the social policy framework that had gradually emerged in piecemeal fashion during the initial phases of economic liberalization. Major policy decisions during the focal period included adopting a single national pension plan for urban areas, standardizing unemployment insurance, (re)establishing nationwide rural health care coverage, opening urban education systems to children of rural migrants, introducing trilingual education policies in ethnic minority regions, expanding college enrolment, addressing the challenge of HIV/AIDS more comprehensively, and equalizing social welfare spending across provinces, among others. Unresolved is the direction of policy in the face of longer-term industrial and demographic trends—-and the possibility of a chronically weak global economy. Chinese Social Policy in a Time of Transition offers a foundation from which to explore those issues based on a composite snapshot of Chinese social policy at its point of greatest maturation prior to the 2007 global crisis.